Amazon.com have announced the dates for their annual Christmas selling restrictions in the Toys & Games category.
From the 16th September 2009, they will stop accepting new sellers in the Toys & Games category and from the 16th November. Existing sellers who do not meet their performance criteria will not be able to sell in Toys & Games again until the first week of January 2010.
Starting on 16th November Amazon will also be monitoring the performance and listings of all sellers who are approved to sell in Toys & Games and reserve the right to cancel listings, suspend accounts and prohibit the selling of specific products during the holiday season to maintain a seller platform that is safe for buyers.
The restrictions only apply to toys and games and sellers will be able to continue selling in other categories as normal.
6 Responses
Another few months of pain and stress for the small businesses that rely on amazon for their income. If Amazon are so worried about poor performing sellers selling tat at Christmas why let them sell on the site atall? All this does is make life very hard for the genuine toy and game sellers on amazon. With a 1% margin of error the tolerances are very very tight…. It seems more like a deliberate cull than anything else.
is this just for Amazon.com, or Amazon.co.uk as well?
Currently just .com, although I’d expect to see a similar step for .co.uk soon
I received mine from .co.uk yesterday, it’s as above.
It is .co.uk that are implementing these. I wonder if it’s a deliberate attempt to suspend sellers so that Amazon can preserve the buy box for themselves. To suspend sellers for a 1% defect rate through negative feedback comments simply isn’t fair.
The system is open to huge abuse (competitors leaving you bad feedback so that you are suspended)and customers are completely unaware that their simple comment could be the one thing that brings down a small business.
The way the buy box is allocated seems to be increasingly skewed to give priority to Amazon themselves, price no longer seems to be the main factor neither does availability, even when out of stock they still get the buy box (“Not in stock; order now and we’ll deliver when available”). Some of my best selling lines are now being sold directly by Amazon, Amazon are on a winner, watch what sells well then stock it themselves – advertise with free ‘super saver delivery’ to make it look cheaper but make First Class paid for delivery the default in checkout. It is a real gamble to order stock in based on last Christmas’s sales, you never know what Amazon will do or if another seller will start selling at virtually no profit or even a loss.